Super Smash Bros is by far one of the most successful and iconic game series of all time. While it technically got its start on the N64, the first game was pretty barebones in terms of content, and it wasn’t until Super Smash Bros Melee that the series really took off. As the ultimate crossover for Nintendo characters, and later just video game characters in general, it’s not hard to see why the series was and still is incredibly popular.
Growing up I greatly enjoyed both Melee and Brawl, but it’s been years since I last played them. I did play the Super Smash Bros game for the 3DS when it came out, but it didn’t keep my attention for very long, and for various reasons I never felt compelled to play Ultimate. So now that I’m going through the Gamecube’s library I figured I should give Melee another try and see how it holds up.
I also ended up playing Brawl again as well, and I’d like to compare them for a bit. Back when I was a kid I thought that Brawl was hands down better. I mean, how could it not be? It had more characters, more stages, more content, more stuff to do, and it seemed more like a finished product than Melee, which felt a bit unpolished in certain areas. So whenever I heard that some people thought Melee was better I was genuinely mystified.
But having gone back and played both again, I can now see where those people are coming from. While Brawl made a lot of improvements to the formula, the core fighting mechanics are much smoother in Melee. The most glaring flaw in Brawl is the stupid tripping mechanic, where characters will just randomly trip, which is a bad idea that will ruin many moments in the game. But even beyond that the way the character roster is balanced is really off. In Melee pretty much every character was viable in a fight, and while each character had their various strengths and weaknesses, ultimately you could pick any of them and still expect to win if you were skilled enough. There was a slight issue with cloning, in that some characters were a bit too similar to each other in both appearance and play style, but overall the gameplay was balanced.
In Brawl, though, the gameplay is very much unbalanced. It did get rid of the cloning issue, so now each character does feel distinct, but the problem is that, unlike in Melee, some characters are a lot more viable than others. In Melee skill was the primary factor in determining who would win, while in Brawl which character you chose played a much larger role. Skill is still important in Brawl, but some characters are a lot easier to utilize than others, and if your favorite character happens to be one of the weaker ones you’re gonna have a bad time.
Of course, none of these flaws with Brawl particularly matter if you were like me and you primarily played Super Smash Bros by yourself, and sometimes for casual fun with friends, which probably explains why I never really noticed them when I was younger. And if that’s the main thing you want out of SSB then Brawl is better, as it does have much more content. But if you like playing SSB competitively then I can see why Melee is the more attractive option, as the core gameplay is smoother and more balanced.
But while Melee and Brawl are both good games, after playing them both again I realized that I don’t really like either of them as much as I used to.
Part of it might be because SSB is by design very multiplayer focused, and for various reasons I don’t like multiplayer games very much. As a kid it was pretty easy to find friends to play Melee or Brawl with, but now that I’m an adult it’s become a lot harder. It also doesn’t help that my social life, what little there was of it, dried up during the pandemic.
Another problem is that I’ve come to realize that I just don’t like fighting games very much. When it comes to what I want to get out of a game, I tend to like something of substance, whether it be to experience a good story, completing a set of increasingly difficult structured challenges, embarking on an epic quest in another world, or some mix of all three. But fighting games are by and large the gaming equivalent of mashing action figures together, and while that can be fun there’s not much depth to it.
The main appeal of SSB is that it’s all these characters we recognize and love coming together in one space. But I realized that if all of the characters were replaced with wire frames or random people I didn’t know, the game would lose most of its allure, since the actual gameplay isn’t all that deep or fun.
Another thing that I realized that bugs me about SSB is the way the content is unlocked. The process of unlocking all of the characters, stages, and trophies is incredibly tedious, extremely time consuming, and nightmarishly frustrating. Brawl is a bit better than Melee in this regard, but both require you to do the same things over and over and over again. And what’s a little insidious is that despite the fact that I find the core gameplay to be rather dull and repetitive, the prospect of unlocking all the content was enough to keep me hooked for quite a while, both when I was younger, and when I went back to these games recently.
It reminds me of when I got addicted to Pokemon during my early teen years. At first I was genuinely having fun, and simply enjoyed going through the games while having an exciting adventure with my Pokemon. But before long I became obsessed with catching them all. I would spend all of my spare time making my way through the GBA and DS games trying to find them all, jumping through all sorts of hoops and doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. I felt increasingly numb and exhausted as I slowly but surely filled out the international Pokedex, but I was determined to catch all of them.
And then one day it suddenly hit me: I wasn’t having fun. Not at all, in fact. And I realized that, if for whatever reason this cartridge was destroyed, that would render all of the time I had spent on this a complete waste. Because I wasn’t doing any of this because it was fun, I was doing it out of a sense of obligation, a need to complete things. Ever since that day I’ve been very careful about how I spend my time playing games, and if I’m not having fun I will quickly bail on a game.
That’s one of the many reasons why I find the way the Pokemon games are designed and marketed to be rather insidious, because it’s preying on people with certain compulsive tendencies. Of course you don’t have to catch all of the pokemon to beat the game, but you know damn well there are people who will anyway because they feel the need to 100% complete the game.
And it’s a similar problem with the SSB games. They use the trophies and the fond feelings you have for other games as the prize to get you to keep playing for hours and hours, and you keep going because you feel bad about leaving the game incomplete, and because the little notification you get when you unlock a new trophy or stage offers that small dopamine rush that makes you think all the tedious grinding you had to do to get it was worth it.
Of course I understand that not everyone has these compulsive tendencies, and some people can play Pokemon and the older SSB games without feeling the obsessive need to 100% them. And if you can play these games and have fun, that’s great, more power to you. But for me, I don’t find the core gameplay of SSB to be all that compelling or fun, and I find it rather insidious that a game can override that fact and leverage its more superficial aspects, in this case the characters and franchises of other games, to keep me hooked, however briefly.
In the case of SSB I don’t think the creators had nefarious intentions. But it’s an uncomfortable reminder of how so much of the gaming industry nowadays is predatory in nature, and is actively targeting people with compulsive or addictive tendencies for monetary gain. And of course I could go on a long rant about everything wrong with the Pokemon franchise, but that’s a topic for another time.
So…I guess the point of this article is that both Melee and Brawl are still good games, though which one is better is up to personal preference, and for me I don’t like them anymore because of certain issues I have with the way they’re structured, because I don’t really like fighting games, and because they indirectly reminded me of how screwed up the world is, as if I needed any more reminders. But I completely understand why people still enjoy these games, even if personally I can’t anymore.
Comments